> I doubt people would transition to agriculture if it was harder than living off the land. I'm mostly with you, so I'm not good at summarizing the other side'

> I doubt people would transition to agriculture if it was harder than living off the land. I'm mostly with you, so I'm not good at summarizing the other side's point. But I think there are several reasonable assumptions they talk about where they might be right: 1: these people usually assume that very low population densities are desirable (I mean, obviously, that's a prerequisite for hunter gatherer society) This is their strongest point, really, that no matter how fertile the area you live in, once you get more than a certain population density, you need to go agricultural or you need to starve. 2: before agriculture, perhaps people only lived in the areas where food was super plentiful naturally. It's totally possible, maybe even likely that there used to be more areas like that than there were after history started being recorded. - this argument is reasonable, but it's mostly a callback to 1. An active human eats a lot, and it doesn't take a whole lot of humans to deplete just about any eden. I mean, the obvious counterpoint within this context is that density really helps encourage specialization, so even if the life of a low-density hunter-gatherer is easier, it's not going to involve a whole lot of specialization.